Burak Bekdil is a Turkish columnist who wrote for the daily Hürriyet for 29 years until January 2017, when he was fired "for writing what was actually taking place in Turkey."
James Cuno, art historian and President of the J. Paul Getty Trust, describes Bekdil as "a frequent critic of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. in 2002, he received an eighteen-month suspended sentence for "insulting the judiciary".